From Sweden to southern Spain, from Holland to Hungary, populist forces have gained seats in recent elections – and they now scent power in Brussels. The European Union is gearing up for parliamentary elections in May, when the balance of power could shift decisively. But as Henry Ridgwell reports from London, there are growing contradictions within the populist movements – and they face growing competition on the streets of Europe.
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The European Union has a message for Prime Minister Theresa May as she plots a path out of the Brexit impasse: Britain needs to decide what it really wants but the negotiated divorce deal will not be reopened.

With less than nine weeks until Britain is due by law to leave the European Union on March 29, there is no agreement yet in London on how and even whether to leave the world’s biggest trading bloc.

Parliament defeated May’s deal two weeks ago by a huge margin, with many Brexit-supporting rebels in her Conservative Party angry at the Irish “backstop,” an insurance policy aimed at preventing a hard border in Ireland if no other solutions can be agreed.

Ahead of Tuesday’s votes in the British parliament on a way forward, lawmakers in May’s party are pushing for her to demand the European Union drop the backstop and replace it with something else.

“It is quite a challenge to see how you can construct from a diversity of the opposition a positive majority for the deal,” EU deputy chief negotiator Sabine Weyand told a Brussels conference organized by the European Policy Center think-tank.

In a note of criticism of May’s strategy, she said there appeared to be a lack of “ownership” in Britain of the agreement struck between the two sides in November, and that there was insufficient transparency in the prime minister’s moves.

“There will be no more negotiations on the Withdrawal Agreement,” said Weyand, a German senior civil servant at the European Commission, reiterating the EU stance.

As the Brexit crisis goes down to the line, however, EU officials indicated there might be wriggle room if May came back with a clear, and viable, request for changes that she — and the EU — believe will secure a final ratification.

Wriggle room?

However, Weyand echoed her boss Michel Barnier in saying that Britain could resolve some of the problems caused by opposition to the Irish backstop by changing some of its demands on post-Brexit trade.

Referring to an amendment to May’s proposed next steps on Brexit put forward by senior Conservative lawmaker Graham Brady, who wants “alternative arrangements” to the backstop, Weyand said that the withdrawal treaty already contained that possibility.

“We are open to alternative arrangements” on the Irish border, she said. “The problem with the Brady amendment is that it does not spell out what they are.

“The backstop is not a prerequisite for the future relationship,” she said. “We are open to alternative proposals.”

A source in May’s office said the government would tell Conservative lawmakers to vote in favor of Brady’s amendment if it is selected by the speaker on Tuesday.

Britain remaining in a customs union, or even the EU single market, could help reach a final agreement, Weyand said, adding: “We need decisions on the U.K. side on the direction of travel.”

Weyand said the ratification of the EU-U.K. deal would build the trust necessary to build a new relationship, but ruled out bowing to British calls to set a time limit to the backstop beyond which the insurance policy would lapse.

“A time-limit on the backstop defeats the purpose of the backstop because it means that once the backstop expires you stand there with no solution for this border,” Weyand said.

Impasse 

Speaking to the same conference, a former British envoy to the EU, Ivan Rogers, said he expected the deadlock to persist in the coming weeks, saying it had always seemed likely that the outcome would remain in doubt until much closer to March 29.

Rogers was speaking in a personal capacity, having resigned two years ago after differences with May over the negotiation.

The question for May is whether the EU can offer enough to get a variant of her defeated deal through parliament.

May wants to use a series of votes on Tuesday to find a consensus that lawmakers in her own party could support, just two weeks since her deal suffered the biggest parliamentary defeat in modern British history.

Parliament will vote on proposals made by lawmakers including a delay to Brexit and going back to the EU to demand changes to the Northern Irish backstop.

In essence, May is forcing lawmakers to show their cards on what sort of Brexit, if any, they want. Lawmakers in her own party want her to demand a last-minute change to the withdrawal deal to remove the backstop, which they fear could end up trapping the U.K. in a permanent customs union with the EU.

 

 
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When Germany signed a deal last month to help Bolivia exploit its huge lithium reserves, it hailed the venture as a deepening of economic ties with the South American country. But it also gives Germany entry into the new “Great Game,” in which big powers like China are jostling across the globe for access to the prized electric battery metal.

The signing of the deal in Berlin on Dec. 12 capped two years of intense lobbying by Germany as it sought to persuade President Evo Morales’ government that a small German family-run company was a better bet than its Chinese rivals, according to Reuters interviews with German and Bolivian officials.

While the substance of the deal has been reported, how China, Bolivia’s biggest non-institutional lender and close ideological ally, lost out to Germany has not.

China has been quietly cornering the global lithium market, making deals in Asia, Chile and Argentina as it seeks to lock in access to a strategic resource that could power the next energy revolution.

China has invested $4.2 billion in South America in the past two years, surpassing the value of similar deals by Japanese and South Korean companies in the same period. Chinese entities now control nearly half of global lithium production and 60 percent of electric battery production capacity.

German officials told Reuters they championed the bid by ACI Systems GmbH because they saw an opportunity to lower Germany’s reliance on Asian battery makers and help its carmakers catch up with Chinese and U.S. rivals in the race to make electric cars.

The German push included a series of visits by German government officials who talked up the benefits of picking a German company. Bolivian officials also toured German battery factories, Bolivia’s deputy minister of High Energy Technologies, Luis Alberto Echazu, told Reuters.

German Economy Minister Peter Altmaier wrote a letter to Morales, an environmental champion, emphasizing Germany’s commitment to environment protection.

The lobbying effort was capped by a call last April between Altmaier and Morales, Bolivian, German and ACI officials said, without offering details of what was discussed.

German diplomats in La Paz also stressed high-level German government backing for the project, potential loan guarantees and the tantalizing prospect of supply agreements with German automakers, ACI and Bolivian officials told Reuters.

ACI’s win means Germany now has a foothold in the final frontier of South America’s so-called Lithium Triangle: the Uyuni salt flat in Bolivia, one of the world’s largest untapped deposits. The triangle comprises lithium deposits in an area that includes parts of Chile, Argentina and Bolivia.

“This partnership secures lithium supplies for us and breaks the Chinese monopoly,” Wolfgang Tiefensee, economy minister of the German state of Thuringia, an automotive manufacturing hub, told Reuters during a visit to the Bolivian capital La Paz in October.

Some risks

The venture in Bolivia is not without risk for ACI.

While Uyuni boasts at least 21 million tons of lithium, Morales has made nationalizing natural resources a key policy plank. Bolivian officials assured ACI that foreign investments in the Uyuni would be guaranteed should anything go awry, CEO Wolfgang Schmutz said in an interview.

In addition, unlike Chile’s sun-drenched Atacama salt flats, snow and rain slow the evaporation process needed to extract lithium from brine in Uyuni, and the landlocked nation will have to use a port in neighboring Chile or Peru to ship the metal out.

ACI, a family-run clean tech and machinery supplier, has no experience producing lithium. The company dismisses concerns from some lithium analysts about its ability to deliver, saying its small size gives it more flexibility to bring partners from different fields into the project.

Schmutz said the company has preliminary lithium supply deals with major German carmakers, but declined to provide details, citing non-disclosure agreements.

None of Germany’s top three carmakers — BMW, VW or Daimler — confirmed any agreement with ACI when contacted by Reuters.

BMW said it was in preliminary talks with ACI but had made no decision. VW said ensuring supplies and stable prices for raw materials was important, but noted lithium production in Bolivia was particularly demanding. Daimler board member Ola Kaellenius said: “If it’s happening, we’re not part of it.”

ACI said the carmakers that it was in talks with would not be able to confirm anything publicly until final deals were made.

The “Great Game” — lithium version

The global battle for control of lithium has been likened to the “Great Game,” the term coined to describe the struggle between Russia and Britain for influence and territory in Central Asia in the 19th century.

The Bolivian project includes plans to build a lithium hydroxide plant and a factory for producing electric car batteries in Bolivia. Once completed, the factory will help to fulfill Morales’ ambition to break with Bolivia’s historic role as a mere exporter of raw materials.

ACI has said it expects the lithium hydroxide plant to have an annual production capacity of 35,000-40,000 tons by the end of 2022, similar in output to plants operated by the world’s top lithium producers. Eighty percent of that would be exported to Germany.

ACI’s willingness to build a battery plant in Bolivia helped to seal the deal, said Echazu, the deputy minister.

The Chinese did not want to build a battery plant in Bolivia because they felt it made no economic sense to ship in materials to make the batteries only to re-import the final product to China, he said.

China’s embassy in La Paz declined to comment on the Uyuni project, but said the potential for future cooperation with Bolivia on lithium was “huge.”

Bolivia’s state-owned lithium producer YLB will own 51 percent of the new joint venture. Control of the project was another key demand of the Bolivians, who have bitter memories of foreign powers meddling in the former Spanish colony to seize its natural resources.

Juan Carlos Montenegro, the head of YLB, said geopolitics was a factor for Bolivia in deciding which companies to work with.

“We don’t want a single country to set the rules, we want balance and other world powers must help create that balance,” he said. “So for Bolivia, it’s important to have not just economic partners for markets, but geopolitical strategic partners.”

He stressed, however, that Bolivia had not been predisposed against China in deciding who had made the best offer.

“China-Bolivia relations are still good. China is present in every country in the world and impossible to avoid,” he said.
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Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras announced on Monday plans to increase the standard minimum monthly wage by about 11 percent, the first such hike since the country’s debt crisis erupted almost a decade ago.

The country emerged in August from its third international bailout since 2010 and the government, which faces a national election this year, has promised to reverse some of the unpopular reforms Greece implemented under bailout supervision.

“I’m calling on you, after a decade of wage cuts, to make another historic step,” Tsipras said, calling on his cabinet to approve the labor ministry’s proposal for an increase to 650 euros from 586 euros currently.

Tsipras, who was elected in 2015 pledging to end austerity but later signed up to Greece’s third bailout, also proposed the abolition of a youth minimum wage for those below 25.

Ministers applauded and a smiling Tsipras responded: “From your reaction I reckon that my proposal is … approved”.

The plan must be approved by parliament in the coming days to take effect next month, as the government hopes.

Athens had told its European lenders that it would reinstate the process of increasing the minimum wage periodically after the end of the bailout.

Greece slashed the standard minimum monthly wage by 22 percent to 586 euros in 2012, when it was mired in recession.

Workers below 25 years suffered deeper wage cut as part of measures prescribed by international lenders to make the labor market more flexible and the economy more competitive.

Greece expects 2.5 percent economic growth this year. “The minimum wage increase marks the beginning of a new era for Greek workers who carried the weight of the crisis on their shoulders,” Labor Minister Effie Acthsioglou told Reuters.

“This decision proves in practice what it means to have a leftist government at the country’s wheel.”

The government’s current term ends in October and Tsipras’ Syriza party is trailing the conservative New Democracy party by up to 12 points in opinion polls.

Labor unions said on Monday the suggested increase was far from offsetting the loss that workers suffered during the crisis. Employers also said that it should be combined with tax cuts and a reduction in social security contributions.

The International Monetary Fund urged Athens last week to introduce greater flexibility into the labour market to mitigate an expected negative impact from its new policies.
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U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration on Sunday lifted sanctions on aluminum giant Rusal and other Russian firms linked to oligarch Oleg Deripaska, despite a Democratic-led push in the U.S. Congress to maintain the restrictions.

Earlier this month, 11 of Trump’s fellow Republicans in the U.S. Senate joined Democrats in a failed effort to keep the sanctions on Rusal, its parent, En+ Group Plc, and power firm JSC EuroSibEnergo. But that was not enough to overcome opposition from Trump and most of his fellow Republicans.

Advocates for keeping the sanctions had argued that Deripaska, an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, retained too much control over the companies to lift sanctions imposed in April to punish Russia for actions including its annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea, efforts to interfere in U.S. elections and support for Syria’s government in its civil war.

Some lawmakers from both parties also said it was inappropriate to ease the sanctions while Special Counsel Robert Mueller investigates whether Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign colluded with Moscow.

But in its statement on Sunday, the U.S. Treasury Department said the three companies had reduced Deripaska’s direct and indirect shareholding stake and severed his control.

That action, it said, ensured that most directors on the En+ and Rusal boards would be independent directors, including Americans and Europeans, who had no business, professional or family ties to Deripaska or any other person designated for sanctions by the Treasury Department.

“The companies have also agreed to unprecedented transparency for Treasury into their operations by undertaking extensive, ongoing auditing, certification, and reporting requirements,” the department’s statement said.

Deripaska himself remains subject to U.S. sanctions.

Trump administration officials, and many Republicans who opposed the effort to keep the sanctions in place, said they worried about the impact on the global aluminum industry. They also said Deripaska’s decision to lower his stakes in the companies so that he no longer controlled them showed that the sanctions had worked.

Rusal is the world’s largest aluminum producer outside China. The sanctions on the company spurred demand for Chinese metal. China’s aluminum exports jumped to a record high in 2018.

Trump denies collusion, and Moscow has denied seeking to influence the U.S. election on Trump’s behalf, despite U.S. intelligence agencies’ finding that it did so.

Deripaska had ties with Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager. Manafort pleaded guilty in September 2018 to attempted witness tampering and conspiring against the United States.

 
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At least 70,000 people braved cold and rain in Brussels to demand the Belgian government and the European Union increase their efforts to fight climate change Sunday, the Belgian capital’s fourth climate rally in two months to attract at least 10,000 participants.

The event was described as Belgium’s biggest climate march ever, with police estimating slightly bigger crowds than a similar demonstration last month. Trains from across the nation were so clogged thousands of people didn’t make the march in time.

Some 35,000 schoolchildren and students in Belgium skipped classes Thursday to take their demands for urgent action to prevent global warming to the streets.

“Young people have set a good example,” protester Henny Claassen said amid raised banners urging better renewable energy use and improved air quality. “This is for our children, for our grandchildren and to send a message to politicians.”

Even though the direct impact on Belgian politics was likely to be small since the country currently is led by a caretaker government, the demonstrations have pushed the issue of climate change up the agenda as parties prepare for national and European Union elections in May.

The march ended at the headquarters of the European Union. The 28-nation bloc has been at the vanguard of global efforts to counter climate change but still came in for the protesters’ criticism.

“Society as a whole could do a lot more because they’re saying `Yes, we’re doing a lot,’ but they’re doing not that much. They could do a lot more,” demonstrator Pieter Van Der Donckt said.

Citizen activism on climate change Sunday was not limited to Belgium.

In Paris, there was a debate inspired by a recent petition for legal action to force the government to set more ambitious goals for reducing carbon emissions that create global warming.

President Emmanuel Macron sees himself as a climate crusader, but suffered a serious setback when fuel tax increases meant to wean France off fossil fuels backfired dramatically, unleashing the yellow vest protests now in their third month.

 
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As the world commemorates the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on International Holocaust Remembrance Day Sunday, death camp survivor Cipora Feivlovich marks her own personal milestone as she turns 92.

Feivlovich has spent her most recent birthdays recounting to audiences in Israel and Germany her harrowing experiences in the camp, where her parents, brother and best friends all perished.

 

Despite witnessing daily atrocities and fearing that the toxic food and injections she was given would make her infertile, she eventually married her husband Pinchas, a fellow orphaned survivor, and started a new family. Today she has dozens of grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren.

 

“When we first met after the war he asked me if I thought I could have children after everything I went through in Auschwitz. And I said ‘I don’t promise anything. What the Lord gives is what will be,'” she recalled from her home in Jerusalem. “We understood each other. He always said he was lucky to marry me since I understood him.”

 

But for the following decades, as he obsessively wrote and lectured about his six-year Holocaust ordeal in multiple concentration camps and the trauma of losing eight siblings and his entire extended family, she kept quiet to try and raise their three children in Israel in relative normalcy. Only in the 1990s, long after the kids had moved out, did she finally start processing her own troubled history.

 

Six million Jews were killed by the Nazis and their collaborators during the Holocaust, wiping out a third of world Jewry. Israel’s main Holocaust memorial day is in the spring — marking the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. The United Nations designated Jan. 27 as the annual international commemoration, marking the date of Auschwitz’s liberation in 1945, the day Feivlovich turned 18.

 

She grew up in a Transylvanian village with a large Jewish population and lived a normal life until she was 14, when she and the other Jewish students were kicked out of school.

 

She said her family holed up in their home for the following years, fearful of their anti-Semitic neighbors, and naively waited for the storm to pass. But then the Nazis arrived in 1944, took them away in the middle of the night and crammed all Jewish residents into the local synagogue.

 

“Two days we sat on the floor, you couldn’t leave for the restrooms so people relieved themselves where they are sitting,” she recalled. “On both sides of the street the non-Jews were standing and clapping their hands saying: ‘Bravo, we are getting rid of the Jews.'”‘

 

After a brief stay in a Hungarian ghetto, they were deported on the three-day train ride to Auschwitz, with each cattle wagon packed shoulder to shoulder.

 

“My grandfather died there while standing. We couldn’t even lay him down. And in that miserable state we got to our final destination,” she said. There, they were greeted with barking dogs, screams and a warning: “Young mothers, hand your babies to grandmothers or aunts and maybe you will live.”

 

Feivlovich and her younger sister were thrown to one side, the boys to the other. They never saw their parents again.

 

The girls were ordered to strip. Their hair was cut and they were hosed with freezing water and marched outside naked, shivering with cold and shame.

 

“The Nazis are teasing us, spitting on us and watching us there miserable,” she said.

 

After finally getting dresses to wear, they were approached by a tall man in a polished uniform who introduced himself as Josef Mengele, the notorious Nazi doctor. He pointed to a huge chimney spewing thick black smoke and told them anyone not essential to the Third Reich would go straight to the crematorium.

 

“I’m holding my sister’s hand, and we are shaking and crying and I ask: ‘Is this possible?'”  she remembered.

 

Starved and exhausted, she and hundreds of other Jewish prisoners were presented with a large liquid-filled barrel.

 

“The moment we took that first sip in our mouth, everyone started screaming insanely. It was like a million pins in your throat. You couldn’t swallow the soup,” she remembered. “But we learned to drink that poisoned soup since there was nothing else to eat.”

 

She said they were told it was laced with toxin to help kill off the Jewish race and prevent it from reproducing. Feivlovich said she believed it since she stopped menstruating for a long time after.

 

Those already pregnant faced an even worse fate. In one case, a pregnant relative named Sarah was not allowed to go to the infirmary and forced to give birth on the floor. Usually, the Nazis took Jewish newborns away, never to be seen again. But in this case, they ordered the mother to drown her own baby in a pail of water.

 

By the time Auschwitz was liberated, she had already been transported to forced labor in a German armament factory. Even there she wasn’t safe. The camp commander ordered her to receive a mysterious injection for talking back and refusing to make the Christian sign of the cross on herself.

 

She awoke after two days. By then, the war was winding down. The Nazis disappeared and soon an American tank broke through. Yiddish-speaking soldiers comforted the emaciated inmates.

 

Some 150,000 elderly survivors remain in Israel today, with a similar number worldwide.

 

Feivlovich said in recent years her birthday has become “obligating,” particularly since her husband passed away in 2007.

 

“My husband demanded of me: Don’t stop talking about the Holocaust, because if we don’t speak about it there will be enough Holocaust deniers after us,” she said. “It is true that 74 years have passed but we are still living and we are here.”

 

 

 

 
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French police are investigating how a prominent yellow vest protester suffered a dramatic eye injury in Paris, as well as other protest-related injuries.

Violence by protesters and the sometimes-aggressive police response have prompted a national debate since the anti-government movement kicked off two months ago.

 

A counter-demonstration is planned Sunday in Paris by groups calling themselves the “red scarves” and “blue vests” to protest the violence.

 

Paris police said Sunday they are investigating the eye injury of protester Jerome Rodrigues, among other protest injuries. Video images show Rodriguez collapsed on the ground Saturday near the Bastille monument in Paris, where protesters throwing projectiles clashed with police seeking to disperse them.

 

The movement sees French President Emmanuel Macron’s government as favoring the wealthy. Most of its actions are peaceful.

 

 
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The Russian city of St. Petersburg marked the 75th anniversary of the end of the World War II siege by Nazi forces with a large military parade Sunday in the city’s sprawling Palace Square.

The siege of the city, then called Leningrad, lasted nearly two years until the Soviet Army drove the Nazis away on Jan. 27, 1944.

Estimates of the death toll vary, but historians agree that more than 1 million Leningrad residents died from hunger or air and artillery bombardments during the siege.

On Sunday, more than 2,500 soldiers and 80 units of military equipment paraded as snow fell and temperatures hovered around -18° C (0° F). The vehicles included a T-34 tank; such tanks played a key role in defeating the Nazis and became a widely revered symbol of the nation’s wartime valor and suffering.

During the siege, most Leningrad residents had to survive on rations of just 125 grams (less than 0.3 pounds) of bread a day and whatever other food they could buy or exchange at local markets after selling their belongings.

Among those who succumbed to the deprivations of the siege was the 1-year-old brother of President Vladimir Putin. Putin himself was born after the siege, in 1952.

On Sunday, the Kremlin announced that Putin had signed an order allocating 150 million rubles ($2.3 million) for creating new exhibits at the state museum of the siege.

“Today we mourn those who died defending Leningrad, who at the cost of their lives broke through the blockade. We recall those who worked in the besieged city, who, risking themselves, delivered bread and medicine along the Road of Life,” Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev wrote on social media.

Medvedev was referring to the ice road across Lake Ladoga that was the only conduit for supplies and evacuations during much of the siege.

Tamara Chernykh, 81, told The Associated Press that she still can’t forget those tiny pieces of bread that her granny used to put under her pillow as a night treat for a starving four-year-old girl in besieged Leningrad during the deadly winter of 1941-1942.

In the daytime, Chernykh said she and her baby cousin mostly stayed put under several blankets in the darkness. There was no heating during the first and the coldest winter of the siege, when temperatures outside sometimes plunged to -40° C (-40° F).

Chernykh’s grandmother, who gave the bread out of her own scant food ration, said the crumbs would bring good dreams. She died from starvation before the siege ended.
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January 27 is the day the international community observes Holocaust Remembrance Day by recalling the horrors committed during World War II by Nazi Germany.  

The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. Holocaust is a word of Greek origin meaning “sacrifice by fire.” The Nazis, who came to power in Germany in January 1933, believed that Germans were “racially superior” and that the Jews, deemed “inferior,” were an alien threat to the so-called German racial community.

During the era of the Holocaust, German authorities also targeted other groups because of their perceived racial and biological inferiority: Roma, people with disabilities, and some of the Slavic peoples (Poles, Russians, and others). Other groups were persecuted on political, ideological, and behavioral grounds, among them Communists, Socialists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and homosexuals.

Holocaust Remembrance Day is also a time to remember the bravery of those who risked their lives to save persecuted Jews and others from the Nazi death camps.

January 27 is also the anniversary of the 1945 liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp where on Sunday former Auschwitz prisoners, wearing striped scarves that recalled their death camp uniforms, placed flowers at an execution wall at the camp.

Another ceremony at Auschwitz Sunday near the gas chambers is designed to honor and remember the 1.1 million people killed there and all Holocaust victims.

Britain’s Holocaust Memorial Day Trust says a recent survey revealed that five percent of U.K. adults do not believe the Holocaust really happened.  The poll found that eight percent believed the scale of the Holocaust has been exaggerated.

The survey of more than 2,000 people showed that 64 percent did not know how many Jews were murdered or grossly underestimated the number — 45 percent said they did not know how many people were killed; 19 percent believed fewer than two million Jews were murdered.

However, 83 percent of the respondents said it is important to know about the Holocaust.

Olivia Marks-Woldman, Holocaust Memorial Trust chief executive, said “The Holocaust threatened the fabric of civilization and has implications for us all.  Such widespread ignorance and even denial is shocking.  Without a basic understanding of this recent history, we are in danger of failing to learn where a lack of respect for difference and hostility to others can ultimately lead.” 
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Thousands of so-called “yellow vest” protesters marched in France Saturday, in the 11th week of demonstrations against French President Emmanuel Macron’s economic reforms.

Reuters news service estimated the total number of protesters at 22,000 by mid-afternoon.

Most protests were peaceful, but in Paris there were a few violent incidents at Bastille Square, at the endpoint of the day’s march. Some demonstrators took their protest march down the iconic Champs-Elysees before heading across the French capital toward Bastille Square.

Some protesters there started fires or launched projectiles at police. Officers fought back with tear gas and water cannons and made several dozen arrests.

Some of the protesters have announced plans to hold night demonstrations in addition to the daytime marches.

Marches also took place in Strasbourg, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Marseille, and Lyon.

The protesters gained their nickname from the fluorescent vests they wear while marching, which are safety vests French drivers are required to keep in their cars.

Protests around the country began November 17 against a planned fuel tax increase. The demonstrations have transformed into protests largely against President Emmanuel Macron’s liberal economic reform policies.

Reacting to the movement, Macron in December made tax and salary concessions.

 
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Prolific French composer Michel Legrand, who won three Oscars and five Grammys during a career spanning more than half a century, died Saturday aged 86, his spokesman said.

Legrand lived in a musical whirlwind, with the same appetite for popular music to jazz, from conducting to film.

“Since I was a child, my ambition has been to live completely surrounded by music, my dream was to not miss anything, which is why I have never focused on a single musical discipline,” he said.

He first won an Academy Award in 1969 for the song “The Windmills of Your Mind” from the film “The Thomas Crown Affair”.

He followed that with Oscars for his music for “Summer of ’42” in 1972 and for “Yentl” in 1984.

Legrand, who had been scheduled to stage concerts in Paris in April, died early Saturday with his wife, the actress Macha Meril, his spokesman told AFP.

During his long career, he worked with some of the music world’s biggest stars such as Miles Davies, Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra, Aretha Franklin, Barbra Streisand, Liza Minnelli and Edith Piaf.

He also won five Grammys from 17 nominations, including one for the theme from “Summer of ’42”.

“For me, he is immortal, through his music and his personality”, French composer and conductor Vladimir Cosma told AFP on hearing of Legrand’s passing.

“He was such an optimistic personality, with a kind of naivety in optimism, he saw everything in rosy colours!”

‘A magical world’

Born in Paris on February 24, 1932, Legrand belonged to a family of musicians.

His father, who left the family home when Legrand was just three, was a composer and conductor.

“The world of childhood, mine, was a lonely world, I did not like going to school, I did not like the world of children and adults, I hated to hear ‘eat your soup, go bed’,” he remembered.

At just 10 years old, he entered the Paris Conservatory of music.

“For me, who hated life, when I first came to the Conservatory I crossed the threshold into a magical world where the only question was music”, he said.

He began composing film music in the 1960s with the emergence of French New Wave directors such as Agnes Varda, Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Demy.

He composed the scores for Demy’s “Les Parapluies de Cherbourg” (“The Umbrellas of Cherbourg”) in 1964 and “Les Demoiselles de Rochefort” (“The Young Ladies of Rochefort”) in 1967, for both of which Legrand received Academy Award nominations.

He moved to the United States in the 1960s.

“It was a real risk to leave France, landing in Hollywood without real commitment,” he wrote in his 2013 autobiography, describing this step as “part of Russian roulette”.

The father of three children, he married his third wife, Macha Meril, in 2014.

 
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